Video: “You’re on your own”

posted at 10:01 am on March 6, 2013 by Ed Morrissey

Project Veritas is back on the gun-control beat with a brand new video out today. With gun-control advocates insisting that Americans don’t really need firearms for personal protection because we have police forces to act as instant-response armed guards, PV went undercover to talk with actual police officers about the reality of police response. Unlike the politicians that want to volunteer them for guard duty, the police in the videos are a lot more realistic about the limits of police response — even if they are creative about alternative solutions to firearms in an emergency:

“Go get some bleach. Go get ammonia,” one officer instructed. Yet another officer instructed the undercover journalist to, “lock yourself in a bedroom” and “start yelling and screaming.”

Don’t we all have bleach and ammonia on hand in case we need it in an attack? By the way, the problem with the bleach-ammonia solution is that if you try them together, you’re as likely to kill yourself in the chemical-weapons result of the mixture, a mistake I once made on my first job while cleaning up after hours in a pizza joint (fortunately, we got rid of it immediately). That’s almost as bad as Joe Biden’s advice, as one police officer explains at about the five-minute mark. Instead, several police officers suggested — ta da! — getting a permit to carry a firearm, presumably without firing warning shots through the door.

In the video, Sheriff David Clarke of Milwaukee County, Wisconsin reminds us that we are truly “on our own.” He’s back in the news today, too, responding to the Milwaukee chief of police, who kept rudely interrupting a US Senate hearing to mock a gun-rights advocate:

Milwaukee County Sheriff David A. Clarke Jr. has fired another salvo in his ongoing clash with Milwaukee Police Chief Edward Flynn over guns, law enforcement and public safety.

In a letter to a Republican member of the U.S. Senate, Clarke has issued an apology “on behalf of my constituents” for Flynn’s blunt Capitol Hill testimony last week in support of an assault-weapons ban.

The sheriff accuses Flynn of being “embarrassing” and “rude,” and hostile to gun rights in the letter, sent to South Carolina’s Lindsey Graham, a member of the judiciary committee that heard Flynn’s testimony.

“Please do not see (Flynn’s) arrogance as exemplary of the people of Milwaukee County,” Clarke writes. …

Flynn has called Clarke an attention-seeker, and has criticized Republicans in Congress and gun groups for opposing new firearms restrictions. At a Senate judiciary hearing last week on a bill banning new sales of military-style assault weapons, Flynn was an aggressive, outspoken witness , sparring at one point with Graham, who opposes the ban.

“The way you have conducted yourself on Capitol Hill personifies statesmanship,” Clarke wrote to Graham. “Regardless of your political party or political views, a very certain amount of dignity and respect comes along with being an elected official in our representative democracy,” Clarke wrote.

The sheriff accuses Flynn of “shamefully” trying to shout Graham down during the hearing. Flynn interrupted Graham as the GOP senator was questioning another witness, and the two talked over each other at several points.

Be sure to watch all the way through to the end of the video for Clarke’s recitation of average response times to reports of violent crime, too. Katie Pavlich certainly noticed the fifty-nine minute average response time to a report of a sexual attack. I worked in the burg-fire alarm industry for nearly twenty years, so none of this surprises me, nor should it anyone else. The police are not in the business of personal protection; they investigate crimes, and cities try to establish enough of a police presence to indirectly deter some amount of crime, but that’s all they can do. Nor should we desire to live in an environment where the police are everywhere all at once, for reasons of cost, privacy, and liberty. The police have a tough enough job as it is.

It’s not up to the police to defend us from attack — it’s up to us to do so for ourselves, which is one big reason why we have a Second Amendment right to arm ourselves.

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